Kids Today

Those few minutes before lunch time are always a little hectic. The bell rings, but inevitably there are two or three kids who are rushing to finish this or that, clip everything into their binder, and then put it away. There were a couple of kids left in the room when one other student made a particularly dramatic exit today. "OMG! I have to go! I have lunch detention because my friend decided to pop a juice!" and she left in a flurry.

"What does that even mean, 'pop a juice'?"

You might think that it was me who asked this question, but honestly, I was preoccupied with other things. It was another student. "Kids today and their crazy slang," he continued without irony. "What could juice even stand for?"

I looked up in bemusement. He is not what anyone would consider a nerdy kid, but he is a pretty metacognitive thinker. "I think it was really juice," I said, "but I hear what you're saying about the slang. It's hard to keep up with sometimes."

He turned to me solemnly. "It's been said, and I agree, that every generation is just slightly less intelligent than the one before."

I wondered whose grandpa he was channeling. "Why do you think that is?" I asked him.

"Oh I know exactly what it is," he told me. "Technology. It makes us lazy. My father still knows his phone number from when he was a teenager."

Unbidden, the ten digits of my own childhood number scrolled across my memory.

"Today, we store numbers on our phone," he continued in genuine anguish. "Memory is like a muscle: it gets weak if you don't use it."

He seemed so despondent; I wanted to help. "Maybe you use your brain in other ways, or remember other things," I suggested. "How about old passwords? I'll bet you remember those."

I, myself, am constantly in need of password assistance and forever requesting hints; most of my passwords are vagabonds on the express train to amnesia.

The other student in the room chimed in then. "Oh yes," she said rapturously, "I still remember my Club Penguin password, and my webkinz, and my..." she listed several mmorpg sites for kids as she, too, headed dreamily off to lunch.

"See what I mean?" the first student said shaking his head. "Kids today."